Due to shortages of many vital raw materials, it has become extremely important to safeguard and make full use of available raw materials. This is accomplished to some extent by recovering salvageable materials for re-use. The shortages have made such recovery procedures extremely useful and worthwhile for many reasons. One reason is that it is a basic conservation of energy procedure. It is much easier to reprocess metals from scrap metal than it is to process metal from ore. This factor, combined with the difficulty of recovering the metal from ore, leads one to a clear conclusion that such recovery is extremely desirable.
Another conservation benefit is the preservation of raw materials. Raw materials are becoming limited and must be conserved to the greatest possible extent. By recovering materials which have already been used for a particular purpose, raw materials are conserved. Furthermore, energy is not expended to convert the raw materials into a usable form. A major problem with recovery of these materials, when they have been designed for use in one purpose, is to isolate them from the material that makes them suitable for that purpose and provide for a means of rendering them suitable for another purpose.
For a specific point, there is a substantial amount of copper wire in use in many ways. For example, the telephone company has many copper cables which it is replacing with other cables. If this supply of copper can be recovered, a great savings in copper ore and energy used for the smelting of copper can result. The achievement of these great savings is a problem because the copper wire in such use has a variety of coatings thereon. It is a problem in the prior art to separate these coatings from the copper wire and recover the copper wire in its copper form for use in making a new copper article. If an apparatus or method can be designed to simplify such recovery problems, the benefits become clear.